The present application relates to cooking system, and specifically to cooking method and equipment capable of automatically delivering food ingredients.
Considerable amount of research and experiments have been conducted on automating cooking. A conventional cook apparatus includes a full set of storage containers positioned above each cooking container. A drawback of conventional cook apparatus is it requires too many storage containers for each cooking container, which takes too much space in a kitchen. For example, a kitchen in a common fast food restaurant may include dozens of storage containers. The problem becomes even worse when there are multiple cooking containers in a kitchen; the kitchen must have large space to host such systems with multi-cooking containers. In addition, subdividing a same ingredient into more than one storage containers disallows sharing by different cooking containers.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,919,950 teaches an automated cooking system comprising a plurality of cooking containers and a conveyor means for moving the cooking containers along a pre-determined path, as to access the dispensers of food ingredients. One disadvantage of this approach is that the cooking containers and the devices connected with cooking containers can be big and heavy so moving these can require a lot of space and a lot of power. Also, if the heaters are connected with the cooking containers, then moving the heaters together can create a fire hazard. Moreover, the technique works best only if all food ingredients may be ordered along the “pre-determined path”, so that the order of their dispensing into the cooking container may not be different for different dishes in the menu. Even with this restriction satisfied, there are times when a cooking container may have to idled as to wait for another cooking container for the dispensing of food ingredients.
There is therefore a need for an automated cooking system that provides efficient storage of food ingredients and a dependable delivery of food ingredients from storage to the cooking containers while minimizing space required, minimizing idle time of the cooking apparatus, and reducing labor cost.